Ward Kelley’s Blog

The purest form of love requires stripping away all inhibitions and defenses, and loving courageously, without restriction. Indeed loving with a pure faith your lover will reciprocate just as purely. The singer in this song advises to “strip it all away” and “love without a say,” using the analogy of a high tides eroding all the lover’s defenses.

This song is a rendition of a father’s love for his daughters. Every father of an adult daughter – at some point – gets a phone call late at night from the daughter who got herself in a bad situation, and desperately needs the father to come help her. The father in the song runs to his truck and drives into the night to help his daughter, thinking about his relationship with her, and concluding ‘there is nothing better than a daughter.’

The song is set in 5th century BCE Greece, where a landowner learns the Persian invader Xerxes is nearing his property with a large, murderous army. He quickly sends his wife, children, brother and slaves to the safety of the shore, and resolves to make a suicidal stand with his small guard of mercenaries. The night before the battle, he stands, during a thunderstorm, in the small temple he built on his property, contemplating his gods – why does a man decide to stand and fight, when the very gods have fled this place?

The singer has an epiphany in this song – where he feared death all his life, he comes to see it as an enhancing event at the end, comparable to a lion who comes to whisk him to a better state of being. He realizes he should mount the back of this graceful, forgiving beast, and learns he himself is the ‘greatest’ entity in his own life, but conversely also the ‘least’ entity in the panorama of the universe.

This song is an unabashed love song. But with a twist — the singer realizes the main attributes he loves about his woman all have little to do with her physical beauty. He wants to spend every spare second with her because she enchants him with her personality, her conversation, her grace. He loves the tilt of her laughing eyes, the sound of her divine sighs. He comes to see Love is about never letting it get old. See the video, “Don Whitaker – I Need the Beauty of You.”

Gnarled Bones is a song about a man searching for his soul mate. He carries a sadness from this – which he calls ‘gnarled bones’ – with him throughout his life, sometimes catching echoes of her from a past life with his true love. Follow this man’s journey as he searches . . . and concludes he’s a better man for the journey.

Poem related to Joan of Arc (1412-1431) earned, in the words of Louis Kossuth, an imposing distinction: since the writing of human history began, she is the only person, of either sex, who has ever held supreme command of the military forces of a nation at the age of seventeen. Although she achieved many victories for her beloved Dauphin, by age nineteen she had been tried for heresy, then burned at the stake. She was also the only person in history ever canonized as a saint of the Catholic Church who had once been executed as a heretic by the very same church.

Set six is my final set and we will go with the great psychedelic band ” The Electric Prunes ” with music off the California Prunes C.D. paired with music by ” Drive-By Truckers ” with music off the English Oceans C.D. On the radio show

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. Aldous Huxley I never married Poetry. I’ve slept with her many times, engaged wonderful romps with her, and understand the passion and lust to be found with her; I know her allure, her...

Why write poetry? Where Rilke’s answer to this question was, “Because it’s necessary,” I would like to suggest bumping it up a notch; I’d rather call it a compulsion. I write poetry because I’m compelled to do so. I’ve actually tried to avoid it for snatches of years...

About thirty years ago an editor I knew told me to lose all those dreaded little words in my prose, the words making my work dull. He said I should always write around: is, was, that, and had. Today I call them ‘wasisms.’ But thirty years ago, I responded the way my...

About thirty years ago an editor I knew told me to lose all those dreaded little words in my prose, the words making my work dull. He said I should always write around: is, was, that, and had. Today I call them ‘wasisms.’ But thirty years ago, I responded the way my...